Seraph Minerals — Global Critical Materials & Plant Location Atlas

What This Tool Lets You See: When evaluating where to relocate a plant or build a new factory for Autonomous Drones, Electrical Batteries, Solar Panels, Smartphones, or Semiconductor Chips, looking only at where raw ore is mined (Stage A) is insufficient—because chemical refining (Stage B) and component precursor fabrication (Stage C: permanent magnets, battery-grade cathodes, polysilicon wafers, capacitor powders) are often concentrated in entirely different countries. This interactive atlas maps all three supply stages across 22 critical materials and scores 10 candidate manufacturing jurisdictions on where to build.

Where to Build — Candidate Manufacturing Jurisdictions for Autonomous Drones & UAVs

Master Critical Material & Precursor Schedule (Click Any Row to Map)

This reference guide explains the analytical architecture behind the Seraph Minerals Atlas, how each interactive control operates, how the Three-Stage Supply Chain Model (Stage A → Stage B → Stage C) and the "Where to Build" Plant-Siting Calculator compute country rankings, and which public mineral and trade datasets underpin the figures.

Why Materials Are Tracked Across Three Distinct Stages (Stage A, B & C)

In standard commodity databases, elemental ores and industrial alloys are often conflated. To reflect real-world factory procurement, this platform categorizes and maps every input across three sequential industrial stages:

Section-by-Section Walkthrough: How to Operate Every Tool on the Page

1. Top Industry Navigation Bar ("What I Am Building")

• What it controls: Clicking 🛸 Autonomous Drones & UAVs, 🔋 Electrical Batteries & ESS, ☀️ Solar Panels (PV), 📱 Smartphones & Mobile, or 🔬 Semiconductor Chips sets the active manufacturing lens across the entire page.
• What updates automatically: (a) The Active Factory Bill of Materials card loads the 8–10 critical inputs required for that product along with each input's criticality weight (W:6 to W:10); (b) the World Map switches to the highest-weighted input for that industry; and (c) the Where to Build Calculator re-scores all 10 candidate manufacturing countries for that specific industry.

2. Top Control Strip (Material Selector, Stage Filter & Map Layer Toggle)

• Control 1 — Critical Material / Precursor Dropdown: Allows direct inspection of any of the 22 materials in the dataset.
• Control 2 — Filter by Supply Chain Stage: Narrows the dropdown to All 3 Supply Stages (22), Stage A — Raw Ore / Extraction, Stage B — Refined Metal / Chemical, or Stage C — Precursor / Alloy / Magnet.
• Control 3 — World Map Choropleth Layer:
  • ⛏️ Mining % (Warm Gold Shading): Colors each country by its share of global raw extraction (Stage A).
  • ⚗️ Refining % (Seraph Navy-Blue Shading): Colors each country by its share of global smelting, chemical refining, or precursor production (Stage B/C). Switching between Mining % and Refining % immediately reveals midstream processing choke points.
  • 🏭 Industry BOM (Composite Gravity): Shades the world map by a rarity-weighted blend across all materials required for the currently selected industry.

3. Interactive World Map & 11 Strategic Corridor Pins

• Country Hover & Click: Hovering over any country displays a live breakdown of its Stage A Mining % and Stage B/C Refining % for the active material, plus any other mineral where that nation holds ≥8% of global output. Clicking a country automatically selects the mineral in which that country holds its largest global share.
• 11 Pulsing Strategic Hub Pins: Represent critical sub-national extraction basins (e.g., Kolwezi Copper-Cobalt Belt, Atacama Salar, Bayan Obo), refining clusters (e.g., Baotou Rare Earth & Magnet Cluster, Xinjiang & Sichuan Polysilicon Corridor, Morowali Industrial Park), and allied midstream industrial corridors (e.g., Marmara–Anatolia Industrial Corridor in Türkiye, Jorf Lasfar / Tanger-Med in Morocco, Ulsan–Pohang–Gumi in South Korea). Pins highlighted in Gold process the currently selected material; pins in Navy are broader corridor hubs.

4. Right-Hand Inspector Panel (BOM Weights & 3-Stage Pathway)

• Active Factory Bill of Materials Card: Displays clickable pills for every material used in the active industry. The badge W:10 denotes maximum Bill-of-Materials criticality (a single-point failure or non-substitutable input such as NdFeB magnets in drone motors or Polysilicon in solar cells).
• 3-Stage Material Card: Displays the chemical symbol, bottleneck severity rating, rarity weight (1/10 to 10/10), the exact Stage A → Stage B → Stage C industrial pathway, a yellow strategic watchout flag, and side-by-side top-5 country bars for Mining vs. Refining.

5. "Where to Build" Plant Location & Relocation Calculator

• What it solves: Answers the practical capital-allocation question: "If we are building or relocating a plant for this industry, which manufacturing jurisdiction offers the best combination of refined material access, tariff/FTA protection, industrial energy cost, and logistics infrastructure?"
• Interactive Modifier Toggles: You can turn each of the three strategic hub modifiers (🛡️ Trade & Tariff Alignment, ⚡ Industrial Energy & Grid Cost, 🚢 Logistics & Midstream Corridor) ON or OFF in real time to see how country rankings shift under pure supply proximity versus tariff-aligned friend-shoring.

How the Mathematical Scoring Models Work

Formula A — Composite Industry BOM Map Layer

When the map is set to 🏭 Industry BOM, each country's composite supply gravity score $S_{\text{country}}$ for the active industry is calculated across all materials $m \in \text{BOM}$ using a 40% upstream extraction / 60% midstream refining blend weighted by BOM criticality $W_m$ and rarity $R_m$:

Formula B — "Where to Build" Plant Location Score (0–100 Scale)

Each of the 10 candidate manufacturing jurisdictions starts with an industry-specific Base Material Access Score ($\text{Base}_{\text{ind}}$, weight = 1.00) reflecting domestic + treaty-corridor access to refined Stage B/C inputs for that industry. When the three strategic modifiers are toggled active, the composite score is computed as a normalized weighted average:

Authoritative Public Resources Powering This Platform

All country mining shares, refining shares, reserve concentrations, and trade/tariff classifications in the Seraph Minerals Atlas are compiled exclusively from publicly verifiable institutional publications: